Blitz (11 page)

With which cryptic remark she was gone, leaving Robin standing paralysed for a moment. But only for a moment. Moving as carefully as she could across the slippery floor, which was awash with blood, she went round the doctor in front of her gingerly, and managed to reach the head of the couch, and stretched her arm to put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

At once she turned her head and opened her eyes, for she had been lying with them grimly closed, and looked up at her and somehow Robin managed to smile. If she paid no attention to the horror of the wound that was now so easily seen from her new position, she’d be all right. She wouldn’t be sick, she wouldn’t. She’d be able to do her job and do it properly – and she leaned over the woman and whispered, ‘Hello, dear. What’s your name?’

The woman gasped and moaned as one of the doctors did something that hurt and he looked up for a brief moment and muttered, ‘Sorry, love, but we had to get that artery, that was – well, anyway, you’ll be a bit better now. We’ve stopped most of the bleeding. Give you a transfusion soon and you’ll feel all tickety-boo – ’

He looked at Robin and lifted one eyebrow comically, and Robin managed to make a small smile in response. She knew who he was from the eyes she could see above his blood-spattered mask and rubber apron; Mr Landow, the surgical registrar who had once come to Annie Zunz to do an emergency tracheotomy on a choking baby, and had told her approvingly that she was deft because she had been able to help him when he reached out his hand for an instrument and Sister had been unable to reach it for him. It helped to know at least one face in this alarming charnel house and she looked back down at her patient, feeling at last a little less queasy.

‘Did you hear that, dear? The surgeon says you’ll soon be much better. It’s – you’ve hurt your leg, you see, and it’s bleeding a bit. But they’ve stopped it now and they’ll give you some blood to replace your loss and then you’ll be feeling quite different – ’

‘Amy –’ the woman whispered and Robin bent to hear her better. ‘What is it? Is that your name? Amy? It’s such a pretty name – what’s the rest of it, can you tell me?’

The woman rolled her head restlessly on the pillow. ‘I’m Betty –’ she said and now her voice was strengthened by a spurt of anger. ‘Betty Roydell, seventeen Sidney Street, London E. I. – Betty Roydell –’ Her voice ran away then, and she closed her eyes tightly and yelped again and Robin risked a look downwards at her leg.

It was looking a little more like a human limb now, and less like a piece of butcher’s meat on a slab. The two doctors had stopped the bleeding and one of them was now mopping away the last of it, while Mr Landow was preparing a curved needle with catgut, and Robin looked at him and at the great gash that she could now see ran right round the calf from the inner side of the knee almost down to the ankle on the other side, and instinctively tightened her grasp on Betty Roydell’s hand, which she had slipped into hers without even realizing she’d done it.

Betty opened her eyes again and said loudly, ‘Amy? Where’s Amy –’ and suddenly Robin understood.

‘Is that your baby, Betty?’ she said and the woman stared at her with hot eyes and said urgently, ‘My baby? – Amy?’

‘Sister says she’s fine,’ Robin said, but still the woman looked agitated and had opened her mouth to speak again, when the babies across the big hall, who had quietened down, possibly because of the sort of magic Chick always worked with children, started again. A long wail of misery filled the air and beneath her fingers Robin felt the woman’s hand relax.

‘That’s all right, then,’ she said and closed her eyes again and this time seemed to go to sleep, and Robin smiled at Mr Landow almost in triumph as though she had achieved something, when of course she hadn’t. But they all seemed to feel better.

It took the two doctors half an hour to stitch the deeper layers of the wound and then to repair the surface, using syringe after syringe of local anaesthetic as they went.

‘Can’t use a general,’ Landow muttered when she ventured to ask why. ‘Not only because the bloody theatres are jammed with even worse cases than this, God help us, but because in her state she’d never survive it. She’s lost over two pints I reckon – check whether it’s down from the lab, will you? The
blood we ordered for her – it should be here by now.’

She checked and found it was, and then helped them set up the transfusion and saw the now restless Betty sent to the wards, while her baby, who it seemed was suffering little more than a bad fright, was admitted to the children’s ward to wait for her. Sister Marshall was a good soul, and never objected to taking in such children if she had space.

‘And even if she hadn’t,’ Chick murmured at Robin as she hurried past her on her way to the ward with Amy and another baby who had to be admitted for the same reason. ‘She’d put ’em up in the bath. See you at the midnight trough – ’

But they didn’t get to their midnight meal. Robin, swathed in a vast red rubber apron, had to clean her cubicle first where the thick clotted blood, which lay everywhere and which also spattered up to the ceiling, took a lot of removing, and she’d no sooner finished than another wave of casualties arrived, this time people who had been gassed when a main was fractured and there was a great panic to get respirators on them all and to repair the injuries they had collected at the same time.

At one point in the ensuing hubbub Robin became aware of Hamish Todd working like a man twice even his considerable size, bodily carrying full-grown people from trolley to cubicle through the busy waiting room because it was quicker than trying to manoeuvre the big agony wagons, as everyone at the hospital called them, fast enough. He caught her eye as he settled one of them in her cubicle and said, ‘Good evening Nurse Bradman,’ in as calm and courteous a voice as if they had encountered each other at a vicarage tea party and she would have burst into laughter, if it hadn’t been for the man on her couch, who was beginning to emerge from his semicoma and was rolling around restlessly and also starting to retch. She reached for a kidney dish but too late, and as a mass of half digested food and quantities of heavy beer hit her newly cleaned floor and walls she could have screamed. By which time Hamish was away collecting more people to take them to cubicles.

By the time that man had recovered enough to be carried up to the ward that had been set aside for gassed cases, up on the top floor of the far wing, and she had cleaned the malodorous mess in her cubicle, it was past midnight, and somehow she had no appetite.

Casualty was still bursting at the seams with patients and staff, and she saw no reason to bother Sister Priestland for instructions. She just stayed in the cubicle she’d been put in and dealt with whatever cases the ambulance men came and dumped there. She would clean up superficial wounds as best she could and make the patient as comfortable as possible and then go and try to find a doctor she could drag to her cubicle to see what more needed to be done. There were notes pinned to each patient’s garments, obviously collected on their way in, and not knowing what had to be done with them, she simply wrote on each the time, and what treatment had been given and sent them on their way, some to be admitted, but more and more, as the pressure came off and the raids dribbled to an end, to homes if they still had them, or to the emergency centres if they hadn’t.

Quite a lot of them went no further than the benches in the middle of the waiting room and stretched out there, and Robin was anxious about that. Surely it wasn’t permitted in this busy department? But Sister Priestland, still hurtling around like a thing possessed and doing the work of three, saw them and said nothing, so neither did Robin. And her respect for her new Sister went up a notch.

At half past five Chick came across the at last quiet waiting hall, where the only activity seemed to be a few faint sounds from people twisting and turning to make themselves as comfortable as they could on the hard benches, and shook her head at her. Her apron was smeared with blood, her curly hair was in an uproar and her cap looked as though it just had been squeezed, then stamped on and finally pinned back on her head.

‘Children,’ she said briefly as she caught Robin looking at it, and then groaned. ‘Do you remember something called food? I’m sure I had some once. Right now though it’s like a mirage. My poor belly – hollow as a – ’

‘Nurses!’ Sister Priestland appeared at their side with all the suddenness of the fairy queen in a pantomime. ‘There are sandwiches in my office. And coffee. Come and get it at once. No, I shall remain out here to keep an eye open. Go and get your food. At once!’

Gratefully they went and found the small cluttered office filled with comfortable fug and a number of people. The two doctors, Landow and Mike Smith, a sandy-haired round-faced
man of great charm and sweet temper, Staff Nurse Meek and the senior probationers Jenner and Dollis, and the laboratory technician who had spent a hectic night cross-matching the umpteen pints of blood that had been needed for transfusions, as well as making sure there were enough bottles of normal saline and dextrose to keep the shocked patients alive. They were all smoking and hazy blue wreaths hung over their heads and added to the heat; but no one seemed to mind.

‘Ah!’ said Dollis, a large girl in thick glasses and with her cap pinned severely at the front of her head. ‘The new bugs. Come over here, you two, and find a corner. It’s all right to smoke – ’

‘Thank God for that,’ Chick said gratefully and curled down in the corner. ‘But I need food more – ’

‘Sister’s a gem,’ Dollis said. ‘Lots of watercress for sandwiches from somewhere – help yourself.’

They did, and sat there munching in a comfortable silence while the men talked in a desultory fashion of the cases they’d dealt with and the nurses just stared into space. They were all too tired to talk, but it was good to be there with them, Robin decided, and reached for another sandwich from the depleted plate.

And then stopped and looked around again.

‘Where’s Todd?’ she said. ‘Isn’t he taking a break too?’

‘Todd?’ Staff Nurse Meek raised her eyebrows at her. ‘Who’s Todd?’

‘The orderly,’ Robin said. ‘The one who carried all those patients through the waiting room because they couldn’t get the trolleys through. He’s worked so hard – I’ve seen him. He must be starving.’

‘Oh, he’ll get his somewhere else,’ Nurse Meek said and reached into her dress pocket for another cigarette. It was still quiet outside in the waiting hall and there seemed to be no rush at the moment.

‘Where?’ Robin said and Chick poked her in the ribs, but she paid no attention. ‘There isn’t anywhere else, is there? If you don’t go for your meal at midnight or at half past, where else can you go?’

‘Really, Nurse whatever your name is,’ Meek snapped at her. ‘I don’t see what the orderly’s work has to do with you.’

‘Nothing,’ Robin said steadily. ‘But it just doesn’t seem right that – ’

‘That what?’ Meek said dangerously. Never, thought Robin in the recesses of her mind, was a person more ineptly named. She had a sharp little face that was pretty sometimes but now looked foxy with anger. She had lifted her head so that the special bows of the fully-trained nurse showed clearly under her chin and Robin felt herself quail. But she couldn’t stop now.

‘That what?’ Meek repeated and Robin took a deep breath.

‘That he is not allowed to come and share the break with us,’ she said. ‘He’s worked just as hard as we have. Harder, I think – ’

‘Really? That’s your opinion is it?’ Meek said acidly. ‘Tell me, did Sister Marshall welcome the opinions of junior probationers on her ward? Or did she just step back and let you run it?’

‘Who is Todd?’ Dr Landow said lazily, and looked at Robin with a ghost of a wink. ‘Someone special?’

‘Not in the least special,’ Meek said sharply. ‘Just an orderly – some conchie they’ve stuck us with.’

‘You’re not stuck with him!’ Robin flared at her. ‘He’s a very good man who works hard and – ’

‘Dear me, do I hear the wings of love or whatever breaking on the turgid air and all that rot?’ Mike Smith said and laughed. ‘Stooping to conquer a bit, aren’t you, dear? You can do better than a conchie orderly, I’d have thought.’

‘It’s nothing of the sort,’ Robin cried, her face crimson with embarrassment now. ‘It’s just that it doesn’t seem right when we’ve all worked the same that we don’t all get the same sort of break and something to eat and I just wanted to know – ’

‘Well, it’s none of your business,’ Staff Nurse Meek said furiously. ‘Much more of this and I’ll have to talk to Sister about you! And you won’t like that one bit!’

‘End of fuss,’ Dr Landow said lazily and got to his feet. He was a tall man with a shadow of dark stubble across his chin and cheeks, and a rapidly receding hairline, and he had an air of authority about him that stopped Staff Nurse Meek, who had opened her mouth to speak again. ‘I’ll take the absent Todd the remains of this great feast and our young nurse’s conscience will be satisfied and our staff nurse’s sense of propriety won’t be outraged. Everyone had enough of Sister’s delectable watercress sandwiches? Splendid. The remains shall serve as a
banquet to our despised – and prized – orderly.’ And he went lounging out of the small room bearing the plate and the coffee that Chick, acting with speed if not prudence, had poured into one of the tin mugs.

There was a silence and then Staff Nurse Meek, her cheeks suddenly much redder than they had been and her eyes very bright, said sharply, ‘All of you nurses, it’s time to get this place tidied. At once, now. I’ll deal with you later, Nurse Bradman. Or rather, Sister will. Now get this place cleaned up at once.’

And clean up they did. By the time the day staff came through the big double doors with their clean aprons glittering in the morning sunshine, and their caps neatly set on well-brushed hair, the casualty nurses looked like the skivvies they had been for the past two or three hours.

Their work had been to some effect, however. Nurse Meek had chivvied the sleepers out of the waiting room while Sister Priestland was out of sight dealing with a member of the nursing staff from the operating theatres who had splashed her legs with pure carbolic acid, and had harried the four junior nurses mercilessly. Dollis and Jenner had been furious with Robin for having so provoked the staff nurse and muttered unpleasantly at her as they passed her, and altogether Robin had felt wretched.